One thing I like to do around the office is bamboozle colleagues with faux-knowledge of the newest technologies. Stephan Kinsella taught me this: he has been intimidating me for years with this tactic.
Throw around a few buzz words and scrappy tech talk. Then when the colleague sheepishly asks what I’m talking about, the moment is perfect: give a look like “oh, I’m so sorry, because I thought you knew something about technology.” Ha ha.
So I had another such moment this morning when I was able to announce triumphantly that Mises.org is now running as a branch of SVN. What? You don’t know what that is? That’s the extension for Subversion, the open-source version-control platform that permits branches of a site to running in sync with each other. For goodness sake, the idea has been around for 10 years! Where have you been?
In practical terms, it means that what you see on Mises.org right now is a spin off of an underlying infrastructure with several other branches that you don’t see. The most important is the full beta version of Mises.org that is a perfect copy of Mises.org live. We are running proprietary software, so the licensing arrangements allow developers a full, working version of the site to test on.
We now have a large pack of volunteer development poking around and doing things. This SVN permits them to have a massive playground to test all changes, a playground that is fully in sync with what end-users experience on the real site. When a change is successful, it is easy to implement the change now, not with rewriting code but by clicking accept. Then change then syncs to the main site and back again.
Even for live site changes, everything is checked in and out so that way we can keep track. This is not only essential for version control. It allows a huge community to be involved in development. In fact, then, this is the next step on the open-source path, open source not only for final product but also for the media that delivers the product. The human energies of passionate devotees of Mises.org can now unleash themselves.
Putting this place took a great deal of time and energy, on the part of David Veksler and a team of volunteers. But it sets us up for a future in which changes and upgrades and progress generally become much easier. It is a real investment in the future of this site and therefore the future of liberty.
My knowledge of this topic is hereby exhausted. For everyone who thinks what I just wrote is pedestrian, click the donate button on the top bar and look at the sidebar where you can join a group of developers. Thank you!
{ 14 comments }
Have you thought about using different VCS? Think git, bazaar, mercurial. I am using git and branching is so easy compared to svn. From what I have read, bazaar is roughly the same and maybe somewhat easier to use.
Nah, SVN is great!
It’s very mature and there are a ton of GUIs.
One of the biggest advantages of using SVN is the safety net you get. Any bugs that you unintentionally introduce can be zapped from production in a quarter second while the dev team figures out what went wrong…
@andy:
There was a discussion about this @misesdev and svn was the consensus that we reached. See http://groups.google.com/group/misesdev/browse_thread/thread/2f4c3276e7ad8259
Jeff Tucker, bummer them with this.
Do you know that you could write books/articles etc with SVN/Git? That will help you manage changes editing, all sorts of things.
Not only that, say if Kinsella wants to suggest you an edit, he can make changes in his branch, show it to you, and if you like it you can merge his branch with yours.
I prefer GIT over SVN. And I host my code at github.
http://github.com
Congratulations. Mises.org now has better software development practices than the Climatic Research Unit. (Poor Harry.)
congratulations on your excellent choice of version control software!
these software suites are useful even for backing up your own personal works, even tracking changes in your curriculum vitae — documents that nobody else will be helping you with! simply attach an external storage device and direct svn to create and operate out of repositories on it, or purchase space at a colocation center! it is like having your own personal, universal wikipedia.
I thought you guys were supposed to be geniuses. First of all, your site has no more functionality than a blog. You could use the same Movable Type installation for your entire site. I know mommy bloggers with a site as complex as yours and they have no degree, and no versioning system.
Second, your are using .asp for your main site. Any freshman programming student could tell you FreeBSD is the most secure server on the planet. Why would you use a crappy Windoze server? I thought you were smart.
FreeBSD? Pfft, everyone knows the only secure server is Midori.
And why oh why doesn’t Mises.org support DTN yet?
Mit: I agree about the functionality. But these changes are going to allow them to add more things later on. I agree about ASP and think the site being written on Open Source tools would be more congruent with the message. But you didn’t even pick the most secure BSD system (OpenBSD) more less the most secure operating system (Maybe OpenVMS, properly setup SeLinux or OpenBSD? Just to name a few contenders) So to quote your own words… “I thought you were smart”
.asp is just an extension. The pages are plain html.
What is DTN?
David Veksler wrote: “What is DTN?”
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-tolerant_networking
OK, I read the Wikipedia page, and it seems that some people are working on an “Interplanetary Internet.” How exactly do I enable that, and what’s it going to do for our users?
@Mit
The site is open source, database is up there, I am pretty sure someone is going to migrate it to MoveableType or any other professional level blogging software.
The point is opportunity cost. David Veksler is more comfortable basing the whole thing on Windows, ASP, SVN etc etc. He is the one who is giving that much time and resources to the website.
I mean are you willing to migrate the site to PHP/Ruby based CMS? Well neither are we. I mean would love to see the site on a professional platform, but I prefer learning about Austrian Economics and doing my real job more than to migrate the site.
Although if you wanna do it then go ahead knock yourself out, create a MoveableType based Mises.org, show it to Jeff Tucker, I am sure he will post the screenshots on the blog, and if you wanna be the lead developer, and there are enough number of Perl developers willing to join you and give their time, then I am sure it will be more beneficial to move to that platform.
Although the fact is simple, the cost of replacing all the current developers, David Veksler, and the current working ASP site is much higher than the benefits derived by moving to a professional CMS platform in another language, another OS environment and by another team.
This may not be the right place for this, but…
Please, please, please remove the audio and video files from the “Literature” section. A/V files are not literature. Besides that, there are already separate Audio and Video sections. This way, those who prefer written material can find goodies just as easily as those who prefer multi-media.
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